The 3D House of Pierogi, by Kate Bowers

Bates Avenue Abandoned Church, Pittsburgh, PA, photography by Kate Bowers (USA) 2023

The 3D House of Pierogi
 
This can’t be real, right?
People driving all night for potatoes in dough across the Pierogi pocket--
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Chicago, Detroit, and parts
of New England, just to get to Pittsburgh.
 
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Irving Berlin.
 
AAA TripTik® official, like we even need that with sauerkraut in the air here.
 
4 Pierogi in a Rainstorm 
The Princess and the Pierogi
Taylor Swift —the Pierogi Tour
Pierogi Races at Pirate games. 
 
You gotta believe.
 
St Hyacinth and his place over on Craft Avenue —-this guy. Legend. Here’s the skinny:
 

1. that time all the wheat was saved from a hailstorm in Poland by St. H. way before he was Vatican official, and the people celebrated by making Pierogi—plates piled with it high to the sky, like seriously, they could have doubled as bell towers ringing out the power of starch;
2. when he saved the BVM’ statue at her direct behest and ciborium from the tabernacle despite his puny strength and their considerable weight;
3. and fed the famished during the Mongol invasion of Kyiv in 1241 and most of Oakland proper, truth be told, till 2011, with—you got it—Pierogi.

 
A real flower of a man and flour. Who knew?
 
“St. Hyacinth and his pierogi!" the hopeless cry, and there he is, just like Batman, except more fragrant. Because he is named after a flower named by a sun god even inside all the gloom on earth. Real superhero stuff, this one.
 
Remember those announcements from years ago of sales out of the rectory kitchen there on Craft, long lines in the cold down the surrounding streets in the pre-holiday hours, making jokes with Dennis the Menace dads wearing fogged-upped glasses and deerstalking caps with one earflap up and the other down as you stand there, high-hair-wearing teens in Catholic school uniforms--with cold knees above knee socks or neckties discarded entirely or now around heads like bandanas--behind you cracking gum and shifting around as they do when forced to wait? You keep watching your breath blow away and the grey of the sky deepening over above Panther Hollow, sure it’s bound to snow soon, till finally you’re inside that square of yellow light—the very kitchen door itself—handing over your crumpled pre-paid order slip and receiving still warm bundles placed from their babushka crowned maker’s hands into your own. This is where the expression ‘wreathed in smiles” was made, you know, from the prickling delight of festive, unleavened dough wrapped around hot potatoes, good for warming pockets and bellies and drawing you close and even closer through the sheer heaven of hot onions and butter seeping out around the edges of the foil in your frozen hands.
 
The wafer and the Virgin
 
And the Pierogi.
 
Talk about your Holy Trinity, the Trifecta of Help.
 
Say an Ave for St. Hyacinth and his crew, his crib long closed and now a nightclub on occasion, all the Babas gone to a new combined parish called All Saints or All the Beloved or All that Jazz by the Diocese desperate to retain its flock having forgotten by now the indulgences paid  so willingly and so often for the sake of hot potato filling and neighbours standing together on cold Pittsburgh streets.

Kate Bowers

Kate Bowers (she/her) is a a Pittsburgh based writer who has been published in Sheila-Na-Gig, Rue Scribe, and The Ekphrastic Review. Her work appears also in the anthology Pandemic Evolution: Poets Respond to the Art of Matthew Wolfe, by Hayley Haugen (Editor) and Matthew Wolfe (Contributor) and will appear also in the forthcoming anthology The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain to be published in the spring of 2024 by Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum. Kate is an alum of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project and serves as a volunteer social media team member for The Ekphrastic Review.